Missing crash reports for long-running processes

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 02:29:33AM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
>>> If we're fixing issues with Apport, I think that's a bigger one.  I run
>>> Karmic, but I don't update everyday.  Probably once a week or two.  And
>>> basically if I get an Apport dialog I just close it as I know that my
>>> backtrace will probably get rejected as something inevitably changed.
>> This could be solved by using build ids and storing debug symbols on path
>> containing the build ids (basically a path that contains a hash in it,
>> which
>> should be unique, e.g. /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/12/34567890abcdef.debug).
>>
>> This way you can have multiple copies of debugging symbols for different
>> versions of the same binary, as now the path is different for each one of
>> them
>> (as they would have different build ids).
>>
>> I have a trivial patch for debhelper to place debugging symbols in a build
>> id
>> path. Also GCC already adds build ids to the binaries, so going this way
>> shouldn't be hard.
>>
>>> I do realized the impact of this and the amount of datacenter space it'd
>>> take to keep all the binaries.  But it's a source of frustration for me
>>> as it seems that Apport is only for people who update daily.
>> You could keep debugging symbols for e.g. the last 15 days, or some fixed amount
>> of days (depending on the disk space available).
> 
> I think we already keep debugging symbols for the past N versions or days.
> We don't need for them to parallel installable as you described; we only
> ever need one set of packages for a given retrace.

How do you know which version to install? If you say 'the one that the user had
when the crash happened', that would fail in the case pointed out in this thread
where someone's xserver crashed, but he had upgraded the package (though the
running version was still the old one).

Maybe it's me who is misunderstanding :)

Emilio

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